1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to improved data processing systems and in particular, to improvements in manipulating data through a graphic user interface within a data processing system. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to improvements in a graphic user interface for manipulating the display of wide-angle images displayed in a data processing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The manipulation of data in a data processing system is well known in the prior art. Data may be manipulated in many ways in a modern state-of-the-art data processing system including: data accessing, data encoding, data communications, data compression, data conversion, data entry, data exchange, data filing, data linking, data locking, data manipulation, data mapping, data modeling, data processing, data recording, data sorting, and data transferring. The large amounts of data that are available to the user of a modern state-of-the-art data processing system often become overwhelming in magnitude and complexity. These situations may often arise in the creation and execution of multimedia presentations.
Data processing systems are capable of communicating information to users in many formats, including: text, graphics, sounds, animated graphics, synthesized speech, and video. Multimedia presentations employ a data processing system to combine such information formats into a coherent and comprehensive presentation to the user.
As a result of the increasing complexity of data processing systems and with the introduction of multimedia presentations, attempts have been made to simplify the interface between a user and the large amounts of data present within a modern data processing system. One example of an attempt to simplify the interface between a user and a data processing system is the utilization of a so-called graphic user interface (GUI) to provide an intuitive and graphical interface between the user and the data processing system. A GUI is an interface system, including devices, by which a user interacts with a system, system components, and/or system applications via windows or view ports, icons, menus, pointing devices, etc.
The term "mouse", when utilized in this document, refers to any type of operating system supported graphical pointing device including, but not limited to: a mouse; track ball; light pen; touch screen; and, the like. A pointing device is typically employed by a user of a data processing system to interact with the data processing system's GUI. A "pointer" is an iconic image controlled by a mouse or other such devices, and is displayed on the video display device of a data processing system to visually indicate to the user icons, menus, or the like that may be selected or manipulated.
A "scroll bar" is a known user interface component that is associated with a scrollable area of a display, indicating to a user that more information is available and may be added in a particular direction with respect to the display. A scroll bar may be utilized to scroll additional data into view and a scroll bar typically includes a slider and scroll buttons.
Graphic images may consist of "wide-angle" or panoramic images generated by wide-angle or panoramic cameras. These wide-angle images may be digitized photographs or videos. Other graphic images may include, for example, computer generated images. One example of a computer generated image may include images for use in a planetarium type presentation. Hereinafter these type of images will be collectively referred to as "wide-angle images". Wide-angle images may be presented to a user in a multimedia presentation. When viewing this material on a multimedia data processing system, the screen or viewing window on the display device or video display terminal may not be capable of displaying the entire image at one time without distorting the image or reducing the clarity of the image. Presently available GUIs do not provide quick and easy manipulation of such wide-angle images.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have method and system for displaying portions of a wide-angle image and graphically and intuitively indicating which portion of the image is being displayed.